Two Days on the Road

For the last two days I’ve been on the road with two of my bosses at the new job. We’re on the way to Indi­anapo­lis for Gen­Con, but the biggest value for me com­ing on this trip is that I am being immersed in the busi­ness. We’ve had nearly 24 hours on the road, of which the vast major­ity of it has been spent dis­cussing the busi­ness, how and why things are done, and for me to ques­tion, explore and poke around in the process to learn as much as I can.

We’ve dis­cussed it from the top down and from the left to the right. It feels like what I imag­ine an inten­sive for­eign lan­guage course feels like. I catch myself let­ting my mind wan­der and los­ing track of what is being said only to snap my mind back to focus and fran­ti­cally try to fill in the blanks of what I missed. By the end of the day my mind is exhausted and I go to my hotel room with it swim­ming with terms, processes, ideas and questions.

One of the great­est things is that they actively encour­age me to ques­tion them on processes or choices they make. They explain why they chose to do some­thing, or if it is an idea they hadn’t con­sid­ered they are quite will­ing to explore it and pos­si­bly test it.

I’m the sec­ond “real” devel­oper they’ve brought on, and so Dave (the CTO for Cool Stuff) is already get­ting excited about hav­ing some help on man­ag­ing the web­site. We hashed out a road­block he’d been fac­ing with an idea that I came up with, and so that will make it eas­ier to do a new process that has been needed but not imple­mented due to the roadblocks.

I had a rest­less night last night and so I decided to begin set­ting myself up for some orga­ni­za­tion frame­work I knew I needed. I setup a Google Cal­en­dar to list out the Man­a­Na­tion episode sched­ule, the Magic event sched­ule, and my travel sched­ule. I have a few other things I’m going to be putting on there as time goes by, but this is an excel­lent start­ing place for keep­ing myself focused and aware of what is com­ing down the pipe.

Like, right now, Octo­ber is going to be a busy busy month. That’s def­i­nitely going to be interesting.